Peace, Passion, Purpose

Changes

   If you had been raised as a Hindu boy at the same time Gandhi was, you would have been taught that there are natural stages to life that were relative to your age and learning.  The first twenty years were for your education and developing your skills for work in the world.  The second twenty years were to be spent supporting and raising your family.  The third twenty years were for the purpose of prayer and spiritual growth.  These classifications make perfectly logical sense.  Men learned first how to earn a living, then used that ability to continue the human race by raising children, then completed their lives by focusing on spiritual practice and perhaps even benefit the world in some way by the wisdom they discovered and taught.  That certainly was the pattern that Gandhi’s life followed.

   There were two basic assumptions in that culture; in fact in most cultures at the turn of the 20^th century.  One was that there was no point in educating women, because their purpose was to bear children and serve their husbands.  The second was that living to be as old as 60 was a much longer life than many people experienced, so guidelines didn’t exist for the next 20 years, or the next.  Today with advances in medicine and nutrition, experts are now talking about an average life expectancy of 110.

   So let’s extend those guidelines a bit.  The first 30 years are for getting educated, the second 30 for raising a family, the next 30 for spiritual pursuits.  That leaves 20 years at the end to figure out what’s next, or just play around.  However there is a third basic assumption in categorizing life in this way, which is clearly inaccurate; the assumption that life as it is will always continue in pretty much the same way.  That assumption is the seed of hopelessness and the antithesis of faith.  An old, simple affirmation is a guide out of the rut of hopelessness.  It goes like this.  “Life is an upward, progressive movement of Spirit.” We are on a journey and we have a purpose.   Yet we humans often step into the rut of hopelessness and get stuck there, unable to find our faith.  The way we do that is called resisting change. 

This earth was born in a blast of flaming gasses, and if it weren’t for change, consistent, progressive change, you and I would not be living here today.  What if you and I had never learned to tie our shoes or feed ourselves or crawl?  What if we had so resisted change that we still needed someone else to change our diapers?  The changes in the earth and the changes in us have been an upward, progressive movement of Spirit that has led to more and more possibilities, more and more life.  Change is the very activity of being, doing and becoming.

   One truth that comes through loud and clear from the Hindu teaching is that there are life stages and our life will change from youth to adulthood to old age. 

Paths of the Gods

Changing our actions

   You know, every time we come to the beginning of a new century, we humans expect great or terrible things to happen.  All sorts of prophets arise with all sorts of predictions.  The world is going to end, there will be cataclysms, the rapture is coming when some will be lifted to heaven with Jesus and the rest of us will suffer eternal damnation, a new wave of consciousness will transform us all, and on and on and on.  And those expectations come true, although not always as we imagined.  Just looking at the last few hundred years, we find a new wave of spirituality sweeping the world at the beginning of the last century, not the least of which was introduction of the Hindu tradition of meditation to the western world.  The one before it was the industrial revolution and the beginning of modern science.  The one before that was political revolution, carrying a wave of democracy.  The one before that was a wave of exploration and settling the earth.

   Now here we are approaching December 21, 2012 and those expectations are wilder than ever.  And I like what I’m hearing.  Some of it is incredibly exciting, and it is you and I, ordinary people living ordinary lives, that are going to bring it about.  We are going to do it by changing our minds about our beliefs, and once our minds are changed, our actions and our lives will change.

   The following is from futurist John L Peterson.  It is from a presentation made to the Unity Worldwide Ministries board of trustees in 2009.  “I believe we are entering one of those punctuation points in the evolution of our species that will rapidly propel us into an unimaginable new era.  This new world won’t work at all like what we currently find familiar.  Because this shift is so fundamental and acute, the most positive option will not make sense at all from this vantage so early in the transition.  In the face of almost certain uncertainty, our job is to rise to the occasion, to evolve – in our thinking, our perspectives and in our commitment to make this transition as positive as possible.  We will probably become some new kind of human at the end of it all – it is that big and important.”

   This was followed by a list of possible breakdowns and breakthroughs over the next 20 years, and the breakthroughs are so astounding and positive it almost makes the breakdowns seem piddly.  Of course, each of us has a hand in this.  It does depend on us.  The critical question we have to ask ourselves is have we each attained enough ethical and spiritual evolution to handle these startling new changes in a way that is moral and just?  They are going to effect our lives.  Can we deal with it?

Paths of the Gods

Mastery through Changing Our Minds

The great teachers of all time say pretty much the same things.  Life is good, relationships are holy, and all we want in an abundant universe is ours for the claiming.  If each of us could fully accept those three ideas, what would our world be like?

I have an idea what our world would be like.  We would live without fear.  We would live without anger, without competition, without war, without hatred and discrimination, without pollution and crime.  The only reason we experience these things, hatred and fear and war and the rest, is because we believe that there is not enough to go around, we believe some people are dangerous and bad, and we believe mistakes are inevitable and deadly.  Are you ready to give up those beliefs?  Let’s see if I can tempt you.

Without fear and anger and competition, we would all be free to live our lives in an ecstasy of creativity.  Remember for a moment how good it feels to do something really creative.  Wouldn’t you like to feel that way all the time?  Creativity and fear cannot live in one mind at the same time.  The only reason for fear is a belief in lack, in not enough for me.  Not enough money, not enough resources, not enough love.  War is simply ongoing scrabbling for the top of the heap which we are compelled to do because of our belief in “not enough”.

Without war and hatred and discrimination, all of our resources could be spent on making this a better world.  For example, an international study was done that concluded every human being on the earth could be provided with adequate housing, food, medical care and education, and it could be done in six years.  The total cost for this huge project is less than the nations of the world spend on armies and defenses in a single year.  What’s it going to take for us to give up our belief that some people are evil and war is necessary? What is it going to take to realize that if enough of us change our beliefs and begin to live fully creatively, experiencing abundance and safety, we will be able to handle the relatively minor problems such as crime and pollution easily?

Stay tuned.  More next week.